Swastika Night by Murray Constantine de [Burdekin, Katharine] - 1937

London: Gollancz, 1937. First edition. 1 vols. 8vo. Blue cloth. Near fine in near fine printed dust-jacket (spine panel faded, spine lightly toned). First edition. 1 vols. 8vo. Presentation Copy. Shocking and prescient novel of a world after seven hundred years of Nazi domination, published by Victor Gollancz in July 1937. Murray Constantine was a pseudonym, used also for the 1934 novel Proud Man. The pseudonym was only revealed in the 1980s when feminist scholar Daphne Patai identified the author as novelist Katharine Burdekin, who had been attentive to the meaning of the Nazi ideology to predict in Swastika Night the annihilation of the Jews, the homosexual fetishism in the military, and the utter subjugation of women, who are kept apart as breeding animals. Hitler is revered as a god and the rotten secret at the heart of the Nazi hierarchy is that the birth rate is falling.

Inscribed by the author on the flyleaf: "To John Hampson from 'Murray Constantine' July 1937"
John Hampson (1901-1955), Hogarth Press author and literary critic, made several visits to Berlin in the 1930s and covered the Reichstag fire for the New English Weekly.
"No one would publish Hampson's first novel because of the explicit treatment of its author's homosexuality. His second novel, a study in sister-fixation, was an immediate critical and commercial success. Published by the Hogarth Press, Saturday Night at The Greyhound (1931) went through three impressions in five weeks, rapidly selling 3,000 copies and winning Hampson wide critical praise. The novel was translated into French and reprinted by Penguin in 1937 ... Success brought this striking, tiny man friendships with other homosexual writers such as J. R. Ackerley, William Plomer, John Lehmann, and E. M. Forster" (ODNB). In 1936, Hampson married German actress Therese Gift (who had played Mrs Peachum in Brecht's Threepenny Opera) to provide her with a British passport. Hampson would have been a clear-eyed reader of this novel. Gollancz reprinted it in the Left Book Club in 1940.
With a clipped review, almost certainly by Hampson, reading in part "... behind Mr. Constantine's satire there is something like logic. With all the arts except music forbidden, with women reduced to child-bearing animals and segregated from men, and with a new and monstrous religion of the Blood, some such nightmare as here presented might very well come to be. ... A weird story which if read with the attention it deserves it must leave one thinking uncomfortably hard."
Copies of Swastika Night in dust-jacket are rare. A presentation copy, even more infrequently seen.
A SUPERB ASSOCIATION COPY OF A LANDMARK FEMINIST WORK. Provenance: George Locke (Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, pp. 57-8); for Hampson, see Walter Allen, As I Walked Down New Grub Street (1981), pp. 55-71